Shane Gillis was fired from “Saturday Night Live” before he ever appeared on it. On Saturday night he hosted the show for the third year running.
The 10 October broadcast was the third episode of Season 52. Rosalía was the musical guest, according to NBC and the recaps that followed.
A host with a complicated history
Gillis was hired as a cast member in 2019. According to Boston.com, he was let go only days later, before any on-air appearance, over off-colour jokes about Asian Americans that he had made on a podcast. TVLine, as cited by Primetimer, describes the earlier remarks as including racial and homophobic slurs.
He has since returned as host. Boston.com notes his turns came on 24 February 2024, 1 March 2025 and this past Saturday. The outlet says that run suggests executive producer Lorne Michaels thinks highly of him.
NBC’s preview credited his earlier episodes with sketches such as “CouplaBeers,” “Rock Bottom Kings” and “HR Meeting.” It also said he stars in the third season of the Emmy-nominated comedy series Tires. According to NBC, he holds records for the largest audience for a comedian, with 73,946 attendees, and for most tickets sold to a solo comedy show, with 77,047. Primetimer adds that he appears in the upcoming biopic Madden, directed by David O. Russell.
What worked, and what slipped
Boston.com’s recap says Gillis did his best work in pre-recorded sketches. It singled out “Upfront Heating & Air Conditioning,” which it said had the same energy as last year’s commercial parody “CouplaBeers.”
The live moments were messier. During a “Green Eggs and Ham” sketch, Gillis lost track of a cue card and began ad-libbing. He accidentally let an expletive slip on air, Boston.com reports.
Cast member Mikey Day covered for him. Day improvised a line later in the sketch, throwing Gillis out of the house for “saying a bad word.” The studio audience loved it, according to the recap.
Rosalía returns
Rosalía, the Spanish singer-songwriter, performed “Reliquia” and “Magnolias,” according to the SNL fan wiki. The Boston Globe and Primetimer confirmed her as the evening’s musical guest. The fan wiki is a community-edited source, so the song titles are less firmly established than the lineup itself.
NBC says this was her second billing as musical guest and her third time in Studio 8H overall. Her first appearance was in Season 46, when she sang the duet “La Noche de Anoche” with Bad Bunny, who was that night’s musical guest.
Primetimer says the appearance followed her LUX tour of Europe and North America, which ended in September. She released the album LUX in 2025.
The season so far
Season 52 began in the first week of October. The previous week’s episode was hosted by Dakota Johnson for the third time, according to a headline Primetimer linked. Variety had earlier reported that Jalen Brunson, the New York Knicks star, would host the season premiere with Katseye as musical guest.
The Gillis episode aired live on NBC and Peacock at 11:30 p.m. Eastern. The cast list for the night included Michael Che, Colin Jost, Kenan Thompson, Sarah Sherman, Marcello Hernández and newer members such as Veronika Slowikowska, according to Primetimer, which cited USA Today.
The recaps I found are brief, and none gives a full sketch-by-sketch account. Viewers who want the whole episode can find it on Peacock.